The beehive …Our precious treasure!

The world of the bees is fascinating and we could talk about them for hours, but we want to start by explaining you how does their home work: the beehive.

The apiculture is the practice of keeping and reproducing bees and it has progressively evolved since the egyptians started to construct mobile beehives.

Types of beehives

Horizontal: indicates the way the frames are placed in the compartiments of the beehive. The frames are the superficies on which the bees construct their honeycomb. The frames are placed as the ones installed before are filled with honey. Due to the existance in the same compartiment of frames which are used by the bees for breeding and for storing honey, the beekeeper has to take special care of not extracting those which contain the offspring and specially the one containing the queen.

Vertical: in this type of beehives the breeding and reproductive frames are divided by an excluder in beetween the upper and lower frames. The excluder is a filter which prevents the queen from reaching the upper frames due to its bigger size but it allows the movement of the workers, responsible for honey production.

In between the palm trees of Naranjas San Rafael we keep and breed our bees in a type of vertical beehives called Dadant. This hives are the ones which produce honey of a higher quality as they don´t have any offsprings trace which can be found in honey from horizontal beehives. Moreover these hives are ideal for the bees preventing their weakening after the honey removal, as the offsprings remains intact.

The bees are an essential part of our orchard and our environmente. We want you soon to be part of it.

We will keep on explaning you interesting facts of this little and “sweet” insect!